GUEST COLUMNIST: Dealing with negative aspects of history

I was watching Schindler's List and am once again struck that the story is not about the victims of the Holocaust. It primarily focuses on its perpetrators and the symbiotic relationship between Oskar Schindler, the businessman who sees the light and Amon Goeth, the labor camp commandant who does not. It is a story about White oppressors. What does the story tell us by what it is not? Since the experiences of the Jews are told in the context of Oskar Schindler, it tells us we have a long way to go to come to terms with the horrors created by Western culture. It tells us why the nation will embrace Roots but ignore Sankofa. Roots is considered a breakthrough production since it was made from an African American perspective, but it sanitized slavery's brutality for its television audience. Sankofa is a gruesome portrayal of the slave trade that was so accurate no movie studio would distribute it. It tells us why so many will celebrate the truth of Ghosts of Mississippi but won't ask why people who see the movie will still know little about Medgar Evers. How many more Mississippi Burnings will we need to see before portrayals of the Civil Rights movement from black perspectives are accessible? This country would be worse off without movies addressing the horrors fundamental to Europeans and European-American history and culture from oppressors' perspectives. It is not enough, however, for European peoples to air our grief over past and current oppressions while continuing to resist the perspectives of people who have suffered through oppression. Why doesn't this country have a museum to preserve the memory of the Middle Passage -- the trans-Atlantic shipping of Africans for slavery -- or of those Native Americans killed in the conquest of this land? Some have criticism Schindler's List for being superficial in portraying the Holocaust. The same could be said about portrayals of this country's own history of genocide. What, then, does Schindler's List tell us by what it is? This is an extraordinary movie told with as much poetry as it was told by Thomas Keneally -- the author of the book the movie was based on. Most of all, it is the story of an oppressor's liberation from the emotional constriction that gripped Germany and led to the horrors of genocide. Schindler is a man who began as a war-time opportunist all too happy to take advantage of Jewish slave labor. He was unfaithful to his wife and had little to hope for beyond striking it rich. Schindler dealt with the murder and madness that surrounded him only to the extent it effected his business. He suffered from the same emotional distance that allowed millions of other Germans to accept evil as a national policy. Schindler gradually discovered relationships and the joy that comes from choosing liberation over oppression. He freed himself by resisting evil, expressing his guilt for what he could have done but did not and accepting the blessing of those he saved. His life speaks to the possibility for all people born into the world with privilege or schooled in hatred to release themselves of the bonds preventing us from achieving grace. One of the most powerful scenes is when Goeth voices his own suffering to a Jewish slave, Helen Hirsch with whom he has fallen in love. He says "I would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness. What would be wrong with that? I know you're strictly not a person, but what would be wrong about it?" You cannot possibly be fully human if you believe that certain people are less human than you. Our families suffer from a host of problems driven by the same emotional distance that resulted in the Holocaust -- suicide, incest, child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse and neglect. Hatred in any form inevitably comes home to roost and it is incumbant upon all of us to resolve our inner contradictions with courage and compassion. I do not believe hatred is the sole province of people of European descent. I do believe my people have denied the power hatred has on our development and relationships with people all over the world for far too long. It is high time for people of European descent to come to grips with the negative aspects of our history even as we celebrate our accomplishments in such areas as technology, art and literature. The price for our liberation is simply the painful truth.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.